Day: April 3, 2013

It probably wasn’t all that obvious, but De Void actually took a break for a few days. And whenever that happens, you can set your clock because that’s when all hell breaks loose in UFOland. Last week, it was the Associated Press, Fox News, the LA Times, and MSNBC practically stampeding over each other to break the news, this time about a single-page, 63-year-old FBI document declassified in 1978. Oh yeah man. Just let an official source issue a press release over non-news and it’s like barnyard hens over shucked corn.

16th-century quote monster Giordano Bruno was burned alive for, among other things, announcing the existence of ‘an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own’/CREDIT: johns-spot112948.blogspot.com

On March 25, the FBI announced how a 3/22/50 memo about an alleged flying saucer crash in New Mexico had attracted “nearly a million” visits since being officially posted in the “Vault” section of its website two years ago. Not a million, mind you. “Nearly a million.” But you can bet your next-born that visitor traffic topped the seven-digit mark over this phony news after the media glommed onto the bread crumbs.

There wasn’t much to it, just a contemporaneous summary by a G-man named Guy Hottel describing second-hand reports of three “saucers,” each with three 3-foot-tall occupants, that supposedly went down in 1950. No reason to rehash the stuff — the MSM did all that — but Hottel was so impressed, he wrote that “No further evaluation was attempted.”

Anyhow, that was the biggest buzz of De Void’s missed week, so far as I can tell, and someday De Void will produce a dissertation on the bizarre cascading psychology of mass media. In the meantime, since ancient news is apparently the hottest thing going, De Void went to Rome last week and visited Campo de’ Fiori plaza, where a heretic named Giordano Bruno was incinerated at the stake in 1600.

Bruno evidently rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and was run out of 16th-century England, France and Germany before the Dominican friar returned to his native Italy to face the music. After all, he’d gotten away with a lot of trash talk, like this:

“Make then your forecasts, my lords Astrologers, with your slavish physicians, by means of those astrolabes with which you seek to discern the fantastic nine moving spheres; in these you finally imprison your own minds, so that you appear to me but as parrots in a cage, while I watch you dancing up and down, turning and hopping within those circles.”

Ouch. And this:

“For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void [yay! – editor’s note]; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.”

So yeah, The Church pretty much had to burn him alive for that. Civilization, with a push from literary luminaries like Victor Hugo and Henrik Ibsen, finally caught up with Bruno by erecting a memorial statue in 1889. But as recently as 2000, religious authorities were still reluctant to give him his due; as apologist Cardinal Angelo Sodano put it, Vatican prosecutors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”